A new approach Sunday, 02 October 2011 03:52

The killing of Anwar Al Awlaki by a US drone strike in Yemen has delivered a significant blow to Al Qaeda and underscores Washington’s willingness to operate outside the defined US combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan in waging what was once known as the global war on terror. The strike appeared to be the first time since the September 11, 2001, attacks that an American citizen had been deliberately targeted and killed by American forces.

Awlaki’s death comes less than five months after US Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, leader of the Al Qaeda network, in a raid on his hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The Obama administration in recent months has escalated the use of drones to target Al Qaeda-linked militants in Yemen and Somalia. The drone attacks had been part of a clandestine Pentagon programme to hunt members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the group believed responsible for a number of failed attempts to strike the United States, including the thwarted plot to blow up a trans-Atlantic jet on December 25, 2009, as it was preparing to land in Detroit. Awlaki became a particular target for the US after Maj Nidal Malik Hassan murdered 12 of his comrades in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, in November 2009.

The Obama administration’s decision to authorise the killing by the Central Intelligence Agency of an American terrorism suspect set off a debate over the legal and political limits of drone missile strikes. Drone strikes against terrorists outside of so-called hot battlefields like Afghanistan have become commonplace during the Obama presidency, and have reportedly decimated the leadership of Al Qaeda and its affiliates. The notion that the government can, in effect, execute one of its own citizens far from a combat zone, with no judicial process and based on secret intelligence, made some legal authorities deeply uneasy.

The Obama administration, in concert with President Ali Abdullah Saleh, has been running an intense air campaign against militants in Yemen for the past year, for, Yemen has negligible air assets of its own. Awlaki’s death could have far-reaching implications for Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East and one that has been gripped for eight months by a standoff between the government and demonstrators determined to bring an end to the 33-year rule of Saleh. There is good reason to hope that Awlaki’s death will mean fewer recruits and a reduced risk of attacks in the United States. However, it does not end the threat of Al Qaeda, and it does nothing to alleviate the rapidly deteriorating situation in Yemen. With fears that a large-scale civil war may break out and a debilitating economic crisis, Yemenis are sufficiently absorbed with their own problems that they do not have much time or attention to devote to the death of a man who was most known for his fiery English-language sermons online.